New Stats Add-On Calls Remote Script

tazz_ben

You're new stats add-on breaks on https (which I've reported in a bug report); however, I'd like to know why you are calling a remote script file at all. The offending line is:

http://analytics.vanillaforums.com/applications/vanillastats/js/remote.js

On the dashboard.

bobtheman

i oppose the remote script.

can someone also please inform us how this remote script is reporting statistics, what information is being shared, and with whom

chuckD

Did each of you enable the plugin?

About the plugin:
Your Vanilla forum is chock full of useful analytics data that has previously been left untapped. With the release of Vanilla 2.0.17, we are introducing proper statistics reporting that will allow forum administrators to easily get much deeper insights into what is actually going on in their communities from a birds-eye view.

Specifically, your forum now records daily and monthly data about the number of new users, discussions, comments, and pageviews. These counts are then reported back to our analytics server so that we can generate graphs and present them in your administrative dashboard. We’ve bundled Vanilla 2.0.17 with the “Vanilla Stats” plugin that turns your forum’s dashboard into a powerful analytics reporting tool, allowing administrators to see activity on their community over specific time periods like:

* New pageviews, users, discussions, and comments
* The most popular discussions
* The most active users

tazz_ben

I can't speak for Bob, but I have now disabled the plugin. There is no reason to have a remote script regardless of anything you wrote in the comment.

chuckD

I don't think it is enabled by default unless they changed that in recent updates.

Tim

can someone also please inform us how this remote script is reporting statistics, what information is being shared, and with whom

however, I'd like to know why you are calling a remote script file at all.

When we released 2.0.17 we:

-> Wrote a blog post explaining what was new
-> Wrote another blog post about stats specifically, including a description of what we collect and why.
-> Linked to those blog posts in our release post
-> Added documentation explaining what stats are collected, and why, and how to disable it if you really really feel you need to
-> Added an explanation of this process when you enable the plugin

You obviously read none of these things, yet you are acting like we've included secret code and hoped it would go unnoticed. Seriously? For others who will read this and nothing else, here is the relevant reasoning:

Since Vanilla was released in 2005, we’ve held strongly to the principles of open source, giving community managers the most customizable, pluggable, simple community-building software ever created for free. This has been incredibly rewarding for us on a personal level as we’ve seen Vanilla used on some of the biggest websites in the world. However, we never recorded any information about exactly how many people were using it, and because the installations were so white-labeled and customized, people (including us!) often didn’t even know that Vanilla was the product they were using.

For this reason and many others, it is vitally important to the life of this project that we accurately measure the effectiveness and reach of Vanilla. Without this information, it will be impossible for us to continue to develop this fantastic free software.

In addition to these facts, lets see
who
else
does it this way.